This section introduces aspects that may help facilitate a better understanding of the disclosure. Accordingly, these statements are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is or is not prior art.
Personal safety is a serious concern in modern society. For example, educational institutions invest substantial resources and funding to maintain campus safety, which is important to both students and parents when choosing an educational institution. Similarly, cities and urban areas around the world invest heavily in infrastructure to boost security and situational awareness. As part of these efforts, more high-quality surveillance cameras are being installed on campuses and other public areas to monitor safety of patrons. The installation rates of these cameras are also increasing. For example, according to the record of one major university police department, more than 100 Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras were installed in 2014 compared to 54 such CCTV cameras in 2010. With the increasing number of CCTV cameras as well as publicly available cameras and datasets produced thereby, there is a shortage of analysis tools for both police and pedestrians to make good use of such datasets. These same concerns and challenges exist in the context of safety systems in other public environments, including shopping malls, amusements parks, and municipalities. However, making efficient use of the data received from the increasing number of monitoring cameras remains a difficult challenge.
Therefore, there is an unmet need for a novel system and method that can integrate CCTV cameras with publicly available cameras and utilize datasets from these cameras in order to provide real-time safety improvements for police departments, pedestrians, and other users of the system.